Ashley N. Woodson – författare

The Future is Black presents Afropessimism as an opportunity to think in provocative and disruptive ways about race, racial equality, multiculturalism, and the pursuit of educational justice. The vision is not a coherent, delimited conversation, but a series of experiences with Afropessimism as a radical analytic situated within critical Black studies. Activists, educators, caregivers, kin, and all those who love Black children are invited to make sense of the contemporary Black condition, including a theorization of Black suffering, Black fugitivity, and Black futurity. These three concepts provide the foundation for the book's inquiry, and contribute to the examination of Black educational opportunity, experience, and outcomes. The book not only explores how schooling becomes complicit in, and serves as, a site of Black material and psychic suffering, but also examines the possibilities of education as a site of fugitivity, of hope, of escape, and as a space within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized.

The Future is Black presents Afropessimism as an opportunity to think in provocative and disruptive ways about race, racial equality, multiculturalism, and the pursuit of educational justice. The vision is not a coherent, delimited conversation, but a series of experiences with Afropessimism as a radical analytic situated within critical Black studies. Activists, educators, caregivers, kin, and all those who love Black children are invited to make sense of the contemporary Black condition, including a theorization of Black suffering, Black fugitivity, and Black futurity. These three concepts provide the foundation for the book's inquiry, and contribute to the examination of Black educational opportunity, experience, and outcomes. The book not only explores how schooling becomes complicit in, and serves as, a site of Black material and psychic suffering, but also examines the possibilities of education as a site of fugitivity, of hope, of escape, and as a space within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized.

This book reflects the diversity and possibility of critical research in education, with an emphasis on the examination of the intersections of social identities for men teachers of color, and the relationship between social identity and struggles for political and professional agency. The authors address race and race inequality in education and provide a strong theoretical foundation for filling the empirical gap on men teachers of color by engaging in questions such as:How do critical considerations of the intersection of race, gender, and profession inform the future of teacher education?What does it mean to be ‘men’ or ‘of color’ in the context of the teaching profession in the U.S. and abroad?What are the aims of ethnoracial diversity in the field of education?The research included in this edited volume explores topics including, but not limited to, men teachers of color and their perceived pathways to the profession; their perceptions of and partnerships with colleagues of other genders; their sexual and gendered identities and performances; and how they embrace, reject, or negotiate the expectations of performing as a role model in classrooms. Moreover, the chapters provide explicit implications for teachers, teacher educators, university, and PK-12 administrators, education activists, and/or education policymakers. In sum, this volume charts a new landscape in education research for all men teachers of color. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Race Ethnicity and Education.